Coke, the enemy of Bacon, was now about fifty-five, and he had filled the post of Attorney-General for nine years. Sir Everard Digby and his fellow-prisoners knew that they had little mercy to expect at his hands. The asperity which he had shown in prosecuting Essex, five years earlier, and the personal animosity which he had exhibited, still later, in his sarcastic speech at the trial of Raleigh, when he had wound up with the phrase, "Thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart," were notorious, and he was certain to make such a trial as that of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot the occasion of a great forensic display. It so happened that his speeches at this trial and that of Father Garnet, which presently followed it, brought his career as an advocate to a close; for within a year he was appointed Chief-Justice of Common Pleas. Undoubtedly, his speeches at the trial of Sir Everard Digby and his accomplices added to his fame; but Jardine[387] called one of them "a long and laboured harangue," and other historians thought him guilty of[388] "unnecessary cruelty in the torture and gratuitous" insolence which he exhibited towards the accused. The glaring eyes, which we see represented in his portrait, would be an unpleasant prospect for Sir Everard as he listened to his cruel words; but whatever tenderness a biographer may feel for his subject, and whatever dislike a Catholic may entertain to the Protestant bigotry of Sir Edward Coke, it ought not to be forgotten that, according to his lights, he was an honest, if a hard and an unmerciful man, that some ten years later he himself fell into disgrace and suffered imprisonment in the Tower, rather than yield on a point of principle, and that, vindictive as he could be in prosecuting a prisoner, one of his enemies--Lord Chancellor Egerton--said that his greatest fault was his "excessive popularity." [387] P. 141. [388] See _Ency. Brit._, Eighth Ed., Vol. vii. p. 95. Although he began his speech by saying that the Gunpowder Plot had been the greatest treason ever conceived against the greatest king that ever lived, he had presently a complimentary word or two to say as to the origins and previous lives of some of the conspirators. With an air of great truthfulness and fairness he said:--[389] "It is by some given out that they are such men as admit just exception, either desperate in estate, or base, or not settled in their wits; such as are _sine religione, sine sede, sine fide, sine re, et sine spe_--without religion, without habitation, without credit, without means, without hope. But (that no man, though never so wicked, may be wronged) true it is, they were gentlemen of good houses, of excellent parts, howsoever most perniciously seduced, abused, corrupted, and jesuited, of very competent fortunes and estates." [389] _Criminal Trials_, Jardine, p. 127 _seq._